Radiation Oncology 2014, 9:84
Published: 25 March 2014

Objective

Cervical cancer is the third most common type of cancer in women worldwide and radiotherapy
remains its predominant therapeutic treatment. Artesunate (ART), a derivative of artemisinin,
has shown radiosensitization effect in previous studies. However, such effects of
ART have not yet been revealed for cervical cancer cells...

"The survival beyond 2 years in the artesunate group was estimated at 91% whilst surviving the first recurrence of cancer in the placebo group was only 57%."

Fig. 4.

Survival recurrence curves predicted by Cox
proportional hazards model. Patient CRC21 was assumed to be missing
completely at random (please see Supplementary Table 1 for a full
sensitivity analysis). In the placebo group 2 patients died within a
year (108, 170) days leaving 10 (83%) in the study, another 2 within the
next year (383, 663 days) leaving 8 (66%) in the study and the other
two died within the third year of the follow up (749 and 990,
respectively) leaving 50% patients beyond the third year. The only death
in the artesunate group happened after 552 days leaving 9 patients
(90%) surviving beyond the third year. These crude estimates support the
estimates from the data above.